DoorDash World Cup Campaign is a Sales Striker

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What makes the World Cup special? The fans. And what keeps the fans going on matchdays? Doordash, delivering food and drink into what their new ad with GUT Los Angeles calls “The Insanity Zone”. The Insanity Zone is where fandom happens – where passions, concentration and joy run high, and every goal sends the crowd crazy.

Doordash’s ad, part of an international campaign, follows a Dasher from house to house, venue to venue, as they experience everything the Insanity Zone has to offer. The ad takes us from a pre-match kickabout in the street, to pushing through a roomful of people glued to the big screen, and to the ecstatic celebrations when a team scores.

It’s all filmed point-of-view style which creates a sense of immediacy and excitement (as well as giving you an idea of the hectic life of a Dasher!). And there’s humor too, like when the Dasher enters a boardroom and its inhabitants hastily switch from soccer to spreadsheets.

The point of the ad is to position Doordash as a brand that knows the fans, understands how important food and drink are to matchdays and is ready to be there helping matches become events for audiences. Screened during matches themselves, the ad is perfectly positioned to activate immediate demand among potential buyers – which means the most important metric in our Test Your Ad report isn’t long-term Star Rating, but short-term Spike Rating.

Spike Rating – based on brand recognition and emotional intensity – predicts an ad’s potential to cause sales spikes, where Star Rating forecasts brand-building potential further down the line. And Doordash’s Spike Rating with this ad is spectacular, an Exceptional score putting it in the Top 1% of all the food delivery service ads on our database. That’s down to its exceptional scores on Fast Fluency – early and rapid brand recognition – and on Emotional Intensity. Get those right and you’ve made an ad with a tremendous pull factor that will work even given brief exposures.

Of course, the ad is also good at longer-term brand building – its 3.2-Star Rating puts it in the top quartile of ads, thanks to that combination of excitement and humor. But the World Cup is a two-month event and so Doordash needs to make the highest possible sales impact in that brief window.

The dynamic visuals, rapid edits and rhythmic soundtrack are all elements that work well at catching the attention of the left-brain, which is more goal-oriented and focused and appropriate for people actually in the purchase window. In most cases, that’s not a great use of broad-reach advertising, as most viewers will not be in that window. But there are exceptions, and this is one of them – attracting attention and emotion just at the moment in a match when an audience might want to order Doordash. Like a great soccer striker, Doordash have seen their opportunity and scored.